I’ve not really found the time or motivation to work on Cluttermm and friends since this summer. Thus, I’m happy that I’ve found someone to pass on maintanership to. Actually, I’ve found two maintainers to take over.

Krzesimir Nowak has worked on improving the C++-bindings in GNOME for some time know. He’s very familiar with both C++ and how to create GObject C++-bindings.

Aidan Delaney is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton in the UK and uses Cluttermm and Clutter-box2dmm for teaching.

I’ve added them as maintainers in the DOAP files for Cluttermm, Clutter-gtkmm, and Clutter-box2dmm already. I guess that makes it official.

Thanks for agreeing to take over, guys.

I’ve been living outside the US for over a quarter of my life now. With this comes some minor annoyances. One annoyance is that certain Internet sites work ‘better’ when connecting from the US. Luckily we can easily make it look like we are connecting from a US location with the help of the following.

• A US-hosted server with ssh access
• A browser
• ssh

I’ll assume you have the last two. The easiest way to get the first is in the form of a web host. I use Dreamhost which offers unlimited bandwidth for a pretty good price.

The first step to getting things to work is to login to the US-based server using the following command.

ssh -D PORT_NUMBER username@example.com

For the port number, it’s best to choose a number between 1024 and 49151 while avoiding any commonly used ports. Basically, avoid those listed here. In this example, I chose port 8421.

What this does is setup a SOCKS proxy on your local machine at the port given that can be used to tunnel traffic through to a remote machine, in our case a US-based server. Obviously, this connection needs to be maintained the entire time you want to send traffic through to the remote machine.

Now we just need to tell our browser to send all traffic through this port. In Firefox, go to Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Network->Settings. You should be presented with a window similar to this…

You’ll notice the 127.0.0.1 (localhost works too) and 8421 in the SOCKS host fields. That’s all that’s required. If you later want to revert just chose ‘No Proxy’ again.

Now you can close the preference dialog and should be able to enjoy surfing the Interwebs as an American. Fuck yeah!

Earlier this year I took over maintainership of Gnome System Monitor. It had been neglected for a couple years which was obvious by taking a look at the bugs piling up in Bugzilla. When I started there were about 255 bugs which I quickly got down to just under 200.

Up until a few weeks ago it had stayed at that level. But a few weeks back Robert Roth appeared out of nowhere and started triaging bugs and submitting new patches and updating old patches. He’s been keeping me busy reviewing and applying patches. With his help the bug count is now at 146. Still high but very good progress. So, thanks Robert!

The big new feature so far this cycle is Control Groups support. Jason Baron from Red Hat has added an option to view the control group information for each process. This is a work in progress. I’ve included an early patch in the 3.3.2.1 release. If you find bugs or just want to follow the progress please visit bug #663644. Also, thanks to Lennart for his input on how best to implement this.

With many bugs squashed and a few new features, the 3.4 release stands to be The best release ever (TM).

tl;dr: If you’d like to help improve phone synchronization support, please run the script linked to at the bottom and send me the file it produces so that I can compile a list of supported phones.

As Murray pointed out, I’ve been working on SyncEvolution for the past couple months. Recently I added support for getting reliable phone information using the Bluetooth Device ID Profile (DIP). This data is used to match a Bluetooth phone with suitable syncEvolution configuration templates. In syncEvolution, templates are predefined in order to make setting up a sync session easier and less error-prone.

The problem with using the DIP information is that it’s just a hex number. For this information to be more useful, we need mapping from IDs to names. A list of companies IDs is freely available. For products this is a different story. As each company assigns numbers to its products, there is no centralized list mapping products to their assigned IDs.[1] So, we have to make our own list.

Below is a small python script that checks if your phone supports the Device Id profile and asks you for the model of the phone. It produces a file that you can either attach to, or copy into, an email and send to me (email address is in file). Oh, and don’t forget to turn on your phone’s bluetooth.

Bluetooth Device ID Inspector

Thanks!

[1] If anyone has device ID to product name mappings for a particular manufacturer we’d be grateful to have this info.

This year’s Desktop Summit is taking place at Humbolt University in the middle of Berlin, one of the most interesting cities in the world. This makes it a prime starting point for taking a tour of the city. For this reason, we’ve designated some time on Thursday, August 11th for taking day trips.

When you come to registration on Saturday you’ll find representatives from some of the best tour operators in Berlin. Here’s what will be on offer.

• Walking Tour (€10): Hit the pavement with the guides from Insider Tours. They’ll give you some great insight into some of Berlin’s most interesting places.
• Bike Tour (€18): For the two-wheel inclined, the folks from Fat Tire Bike Tours would love to show you around.
• Segway Tour (€45): Hey, we’re all geeks, so maybe you’d prefer seeing Berlin from a gyro-balanced electric transporter. The folks from City Segway Tours can help you with that.

You should also feel free to book tours with other tour operators on your own. We’ve listed a few on the wiki for you.

Oh, and remember to sign-up for the Football and Volleyball matches taking place Monday, August 8th, 7-9pm if you want to play.

So the Desktop Summit is quickly approaching. In only 5.5 weeks you’ll all be arriving in Berlin getting ready for some great talks and good fun. In order to make your time in Berlin as productive and enjoyable as possible we try to keep you abreast on what’s happening here. As a public service I’ll summarize some of the more recent and pressing items.

Accomodations

Some of the deadlines have passed to get the conference rate at selected hotels. However, some still offer this rate till tomorrow (June 30th). So head over to the accommodation page and book your room. Berlin is very popular in the summer, so get your room booked early… meaning now.

Registration

If you’ve not registered yet, please do. For us, as organizers, it helps a lot if you register as early as possible. For you, though, it’s even more important. Pre-registering will help you get through the conference check-in faster, get you into the parties (beer!), and will be needed for a few other things we’ll be announcing soon.

Workshops and BoFs

The last four days of the conference will be all about getting stuff done. We’ve got lots of space for ad-hoc workshops and BoFs but are offering to let projects and groups who know they want to get together a chance to get there sessions onto the official schedule. The deadline for this is this Sunday (July 3rd). So go propose a session now. Btw, there seem to be a lot more KDE sessions proposed so far than GNOME ones. So, please propose your sessions GNOME folks!

Volunteering

The local organizing team will not be able to make this a great conference without help from the community. We’re looking for volunteers to help us with many aspects of the conference. If you’re able to help in any capacity please head over to our volunteer wiki page and sign up.

Even if you can’t make it to the conference but are familiar with Berlin you can help by going to the wiki and simply creating and filling pages with information about Berlin that’ll help attendees enjoy their stay.

Sponsors

Our sponsor page has gotten a little more colorful recently. Thanks to all our sponsors for making the conference possible.

Keynotes

Last but not least, we’ve announced the keynotes for this year. Check out interviews with Thomas Thwaite (designer and technologist), Claire Rowland (user experience guru), and Dirk Hondel (Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist at Intel). In addition, there will be one community keynote from both KDE and GNOME each; details coming soon.

As always more info to come so keep an eye on the news. Hope to see you in Berlin.

Last week I went to San Francisco to play Ping-Pong with Andre. At the same time a conference took place.

That conference was of course the 2nd MeeGo Conference. I’d gone to the 1st conference in Dublin in November and written a rather lenghty account. The two conferences had very different feels and it wasn’t due to geography.

The big news at the San Francisco conference was that there was no real news. The keynote had no big announcements: no new devices, no previously unannounced partners. As opposed to the Dublin conference where there was hope for such news, this conference had an expectation of such news. The lack of announcements caused the conference to feel rather less inspiring. While it’s nice to see MeeGo making headway in the in-vehicle infotainment and set-top box markets the lack of a handset device is weighing on the project.

Another obvious and expected difference to the Dublin conference was the much reduced visibility of Nokia. There was a large Qt presence of course. Other than that however, there were very few Nokia logos and fewer Nokia employees came to SF than to Dublin, although there were still quite a few.

Some of the most interesting talks were about the openness and transparency of the project. I’ll simply point you to a very good account of this at LWN.

I was happy to come away with an ExoPC Slate. This is the same hardware as the WeTab which my colleague Jon demonstrated running Maliit on GNOME 3 a few weeks back. These were given out to those who attended the Introduction to MeeGo SDK. The session covered the MeeGo SDK, AppUp SDK, and the AppUp Encapsulator.

Besides the conference it was nice being back in The States. I’m the only American working for Openismus and for the other 4 it was their first trip to the US. I think in the end they were for the most part pleasantly surprised. These Europeans tend to believe what they see on TV.

Today, we’re announcing the start of the Desktop Summit t-shirt contest. We want designs that go beyond your typical conference shirt which finds its final resting place in the closet or drawer once you’ve returned home. We’re looking for designs that reflect the passion and energy of the Free Desktop communities that The Desktop Summit represents.

The selected design will be made available for purchase to the 1000+ expected attendees. The money raised from the sale will be used to support The Desktop Summit. Please submit your design before 23.55 15th May UTC. See the rules for other submission details.

The Desktop Summit is happening in Berlin from the 6th to 12th August. It is free to attend but you need to register. If you are attending you may want to subscribe to the discussion list to talk to others who are going, we also have the IRC channel on freenode #desktopsummit.

… and you can be too…even if for only one night. That’s right! Tonight is the GNOME 3 Berlin release party.

In case you don’t think you’re invited Lennart added this to the wiki page…

Who’s invited? Everybody! Whether you are a GNOME user, a GNOME developer or a GNOME contributor, you are invited. And, in fact, you are invited if you are into KDE, too. Whether you are young or old, have long hair or short hair, you are invited. If you speak German or English, or French or Spanish or any other language of this world, you are invited. In fact, it’s kinda hard not being invited.

So don’t be shy! Come celebrate with us tonight @ c-base at 19.00.

Related posts:
Berlin GNOME 3 Launch Lounge
Berlin GNOME 3 launch party: Update and reminder

Let this be the last blog post to make you feel guilty for not yet having submitted a talk proposal to this year’s Desktop Summit in Berlin. The deadline to submit your proposal is TOMORROW (Mar. 25th, 2011).

If you have contributed in any way to one of the many Free/Libre Desktops, we encourage you to submit a talk proposal. There are slots available for Lightning Talks (3 min), Normal Presentations (30 min) and Long Presentations (45 min). Don’t be shy or modest. Write up a short proposal and give the selection committee lots of tough decisions to make.

If you need help or have questions you can get in touch via IRC on FreeNode in the #desktopsummit channel or via email at ds-team [at] desktopsummit (d0t) org.